OFAC, the US Treasury sanctions bureau, let General Licence 134C expire at 12:01 EDT on Wednesday 17 June with no GL 134D issued1. The licence was the vessel-services umbrella that authorised Western insurance, crewing, bunkering, classification and salvage on Russian-origin seaborne crude. With it gone, that cover is off Russian crude, and Western P&I clubs and classification societies now carry the secondary-liability exposure outside narrow wind-down provisions.
The expiry date was flagged in early June, and the structure had been telegraphed. Marco Rubio signalled the end of the waivers by inaction. The decisive tell came when OFAC renewed GL 55F for Sakhalin-2 LNG and GL 115D for civil nuclear on 11 June, both allied energy-security dependencies, while leaving the crude umbrella to run out. Gas and nuclear cover stay; crude insurance goes. The instrument design reads the policy intent more clearly than any G7 communique.
OFAC renewed two allied-dependency licences on 11 June and let the crude umbrella expire six days later, a sequence too clean to be an oversight. The tradeable expression sits in the compliant-versus-shadow Aframax spread rather than the flat price, which is busy discounting a different barrel. Watch the Baltic and Black Sea compliance bid on TD7 and TD17 re-widen against shadow-fleet rates inside three to five days; if it does, the fraction of Russian crude still routed through European clubs has lost its placement, and the cut is real.
